McKenna serves as this hidden world's most visible "altered statesman."
He has written five books - two with his brother - and has developed a
worldwide following. Brainy, eloquent, and hilarious, McKenna applies his
Irish gift of gab to making a
simple case: Going through life without trying psychedelics is like going
through life without having sex. For McKenna, mushrooms and DMT do more
than force up the remains of last night's dream; they uncover the programming
language of mind and cosmos.

"The psychedelic experience is not the equivalent of a dust bunny under
your psychic bed," says McKenna. "It's a product of the fractal laws that
govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth."

McKenna is the most loved psychedelic barnstormer since Timothy Leary,
the self-appointed guru of LSD who died in 1996 amid a flurry of digital
hype about online euthanasia and his plans - which he scrapped - to undergo
cryonic preservation. Like McKenna, Leary was an intellectual entertainer,
a carny barker hawking tickets to the molecular mind show. McKenna calls
it "the harlequin role." At the same time, McKenna is a far mellower man
than Leary. "I don't seek to live forever," he says, "and
I don't want the removal of my head to become a Net event."

Leary spent the late '60s attempting to gather a hippie army under the
notorious battle cry of "turn on, tune in, drop out." Taking his advice,
McKenna headed east to India, where he bought Mahayana art and smuggled
hashish until a stateside bust forced him into hiding in the wilds of
Indonesia.
In 1971, he and his brother went to the Amazon to hunt for ayahuasca, a
legendary shamanic brew. But when they arrived at the Colombian village
of La Chorera that spring, what they found were fields blanketed with
Stropharia cubensis, aka magic mushrooms.

Within 36 hours of his seizure, 1,400 messages poured into McKenna's email in-box. The flood is testament to his underground stature.

In some ways, it was a turning point in American psychedelic culture. Back
home, Leary's LSD shock troops had already disintegrated into harder drugs
and bad vibes, and Leary himself was hiding out abroad after escaping from
a US jail. Serious heads knew all about the psilocybin mushroom from scholarly
books on shamanism, but no one in the US was eatingS. cubensis in the
early '70s because no one had figured out how to cultivate them. After
returning from South America, the McKennas discovered the secret, which
they promptly published. Magic mushrooms were on the menu.

McKenna farmed 'shrooms into the 1980s. He could turn out 70 pounds of
them every six weeks, like clockwork. The trade financed the middle-class
existence of a relatively settled man. Then a good friend
of his, an acid chemist, got busted. "They fucked him so terrifyingly that
I saw I couldn't do this anymore. I had to work something else out." What
McKenna worked out was "Terence McKenna," a charismatic talking head he
marketed, slowly but successfully, to the cultural early adopters.

McKenna got his 15 minutes of fame when four of his books came out in rapid
succession. His 1991 collection of essays,The Archaic Revival, is
particularly
influential, especially among ravers and other alternative tribes attracted
to the idea that new technologies and ancient pagan rites point toward
the same ecstatic truths.Food of the Gods, published in 1992, aims
directly
at the highbrows. In it, McKenna lays out a solid if unorthodox case that
psychedelics helped kick-start human consciousness and culture, giving
our mushroom-munching ancestors a leg up on rivals by enhancing their visual
and linguistic capacities.

Though anthropologists ignored his arguments, the time was right for McKenna's
visions. He was tempted with movie deals, got featured in magazines, and
toured like a madman. He hobnobbed with Silicon Valley hotshots like interface
gurus Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier and performed at raves with techno
groups like the Shamen.
Timothy Leary called him "the Timothy Leary of the 1990s."

McKenna also was a popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, arguing
as early as 1990 that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople
alike. But unlike Leary, who planned to use the Net as a stage for his
final media prank, McKenna realized that the Internet would
be the place where psychedelic culture could flourish on its own. "Psychedelics
were always about information," McKenna observes. "Their very existence
was forbidden knowledge at one point. You had to be Aldous Huxley to even
know about them."

To his great satisfaction, McKenna has lived to see the psychedelic underground
self-organize online. Sites like the Lycaeum and the Vaults of Erowid now
provide loads of information on chemistry, legal status, dosage effects,
and - perhaps most important to the uninitiated - experiential feedback.
Other groups like the Heffter Research Institute and the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) use the Web to further their
advocacy efforts. But
to McKenna the Net is more than just an information source. He is convinced
that an unprecedented dialog is going on between individual human beings
and the sum total of human knowledge.

"The Internet is an oracle for anyone in trouble," McKenna explains, using
his illness as an example. "Within 10 minutes I can be poring through reams
of control studies, medical data, and personal reports. If anything, my
cancer has made me even more enthusiastic about the idea that through
information, people can take control of and guide their own lives."

Unfortunately, by last October, five months after the initial diagnosis
and treatment, he needed much more than just information. Despite the radiation
therapy, the tumor was still spreading. McKenna traveled to the medical
center at UC San Francisco, where a team of specialists surgically removed
the bulk of the tumor. They then soaked the cavity with p53, a genetically
altered adenovirus meant to scramble the hyperactive self-replication
subroutines of the remaining tissue's DNA. Gene therapy
is highly experimental; as Silness put it, McKenna became "a full-on guinea
pig."

At first, the doctors at UCSF were extremely pleased with the results,
and for four months the tumor cooled its heels. But in February, an MRI
revealed that it had returned with a vengeance, spreading so thoroughly
throughout McKenna's brain that it was deemed inoperable. He retreated
to a friend's house in Marin County, and his family began to gather. By
the time you read this, Terence McKenna will likely have died.